Praise for Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell is an artfully crafted and arresting novel Stefnsson excels at turning small places into the absolute centre of the world

Literary Review of Canada

Stefanssons narrative voice is the books most striking quality It has something in common with the slow prose of Jon Fosse runon sentences rich in repeated motifs that tap into different layers of thought A typical line in Philip Roughtons translation is flexible and supple telescoping from closeup to wider view Once the reader is settled into the rhythms of Stefanssons prose well go anywhere with him

John Self The New York Times

Stefnssons sentences come close to stream of consciousness but so much more deeply as he mines the emotions and perceptions of each character conveying the confusions and anxieties of each with penetrating force

Timothy Niedermann Ottawa Review of Books

A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place Stefnsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans but hes not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations

Kirkus Reviews starred review

Stefnsson plumbs the depths of a young mans grief in this ruminative and piercing bildungsroman Readers willing to go the distance will reap plenty of rewards

Publishers Weekly

The novel is lyrical in detailing hardscrabble life along polar sea shores where everyone has lost someone yet the fishing boats keep launching A poetic soul sets out on a quest to honor his lost friend in the aching trilogyopening novel Heaven and Hell

Foreword Reviews

A brief elegiac novel Written in dense poetic prose with more emphasis on mood than plot this novel circles through the many ways of surviving in a harsh place

Booklist

Some novels are so extraordinary its hard to do them justice in a review This is one of them remarkable for its alluring articulation of the daunting arctic weather and the hovering uncertainty thats so bound up within it

Kassie Rose WOSU The Longest Chapter

Praise for Jn Kalman Stefnsson

Stefnsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy

Times Literary Supplement

Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard Mr Stefnsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism creating a spectral haunted atmosphere Questioning vulnerable and openly sentimental Your Absence is Darkness is an absorbing commemoration of what the author calls the paradox that rules our existence the vivifying joy and paralyzing sorrow of loving another person

Sam Sacks Wall Street Journal

Wistful and whimsical Stefnssons writing is fertile yielding extraordinary imagery There are many tears in these stories and in this village but there is also hope because even unfulfilled dreams offer guidance they evaporate and settle like dew in the sky where they transform into the stars in the night

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Jn Kalman Stefnssons lyrical style has earned him a dedicated following of readers in Iceland In Summer Light and Then Comes the Night each standalone story describes life in a small village in West Iceland normal peopletheir insecurities and anxieties their courage and loneliness Together these episodes create one coherent whole theres no set narrator but rather its the village that tells these stories of hope cruelty life and death

Literary Hub